A workbook I swear by, resolution relief and the forgotten sound of a phone ringing throughout your house.
This post first appeared on The Waited on Substack.
I take New Year’s very, very seriously. Not in the way some people do where they wait for hours in Times Square for the ball to drop (where do they pee?), but in the fresh start, clean slate sense of the day.
I don’t make resolutions because I can never think of good ones (eat better? Watch less Netflix? Go to bed earlier? Boring!) and even if I could I would never stick to them. I’ve tried Dry January a few times, but I never last because I have too many Capricorn birthdays to celebrate.
Resolve to read more of The Waited…
But this time of year I do get contemplative and goal-setty because, as Lisa Kholostenko wrote in her Empty Calories Substack, New Year’s is “a holiday oriented toward the future. It asks us, briefly, to partake in a collective suspension of disbelief: that something can end cleanly and start fresh overnight, that midnight can function as a guillotine.”
And here we are, on the other side of that guillotine.
I love the fake fresh start this time of year offers: there’s no stress like when you start a new job, no body horror like when you have a baby, no turmoil like when you move. Things are only different if you decide they’re different.
New Year’s to me is both the calm and the storm. We host a lot this time of year (we have many family birthdays), but school and extracurricular activities stop, work slows down. So it’s chill and chaotic.
In between all the hosting and partying and disco ball-buying, I printed off the gigantic Unravel Your Year workbook by Susannah Conway, something I’ve been doing since New Year’s 2018 when one of my friends who worked in tech (and who I would have NEVER in a million years expected to do this sort of thing) sent it to me.
It takes forever. Requires time and space and more handwriting than you’ve done since English 426. And I swear it works.
So for whoever it was who asked me for the link—here it is! Let me know if you do it?
I may not make resolutions, but I do make lists. I’m very ritualistic (superstitious?) about them. I wrote out my first goal-list when I left my former ad agency to start my own in 2011. I don’t remember everything that was on it—I really should dig it up—but it was things like contribute articles, land speaking engagements, teach workshops, blah blah blah.
I became obsessive about writing out these lists when I looked back on that first one and saw I’d achieved everything on it, except the thing I put number one: write a book. Way back then it didn’t even make sense for that to be on there because I was solely focused on copywriting and the like. (You can read about how and when that changed here.)
But I see now I was working on my book before I was actually working on my book.
Fast forward to 2025, which was for me a leap year with a lowercase l. The first thing I put on my goal-list for 2025 was find a literary agent. (If you’re interested in how I landed an agent, send me a note? I get the sense more of you are readers than writers, but lemme know if I’m wrong!)
Haven’t made my list for 2026 yet, but I’m hoping it’ll also be infused with magic.
Can’t wait
What will this year hold? Jessica DeFino of Flesh World has beauty industry predictions for 2026, Ted Gioia predicts even more vintage shopping, and I have one hyper specific prediction for 2026: the return of the Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy-length coat (thanks to next month’s American Love Story) which you’d fully be able to score vintage. Oh, that and stainless steel kitchen and dining table accents.
Thank you!
After I wrote an Op-Ed for the Vancouver Sun about getting personal devices out of classrooms (you can read it here—along with the backstory because I finally figured out why I’ve cared about this long before my kids were old enough for it to get messy).
I got so many notes from so many of you who are also on this mission. Thank you! Here are a few of the resources you’ve shared:
- How the New York public school phone ban saved high school, in NY Mag (thank you, Verity!)
- Nine ways to say “Not yet” to smart phones (thank you, Leah!)
- The Brick app (thanks, T!)
- In case you too were wondering whether you need a physical phone line in order to get a landline for your place—you don’t! You can do it through the internet. And I have to say: it’s wild hearing a phone ring throughout the house when my kids’ friends call them. It’s like we’ve transformed ourselves into a 90s household.
A friend and I are going to be meeting with an MP (Member of Parliament for those of you outside Canada!) about devices and kids. And I’m thinking of pitching a segment to a morning show to go along with it because I want to make these changes actually happen. So if you have any suggestions for how to build on this momentum, please send them my way?
Thanks, y’all! And Happy New Year! May your lists be long and your dogs: disco!
Kelsey
P.S. Do you also kind of wish you spent a cringey NYE with the Backstreet Boys?
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